Case Study on Death and Dying
Name
Institutional Affiliation
, CASE STUDY ON DEATH AND DYING 2
Case Study on Death and Dying
In healthcare, different religious beliefs play a critical role in the kind of care provided to
patients. Duckham and Schreiber state that it is essential for health providers in all levels to
understand the various religious worldviews (2016). Doing this eases the delivery of care
according to specific patient needs. The present case study involves George, a patient diagnosed
with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative disease in which a patient loses motor
control, including the ability to speak, breathe, eat, and move hence eventually leading to death.
Euthanasia is one of the options in such illnesses, but which is a controversial issue in bioethics,
especially receiving varying Christians and healthcare perspectives.
Suffering and Fallenness
The world's suffering and fallenness are interrelated in a Christian perspective. In the
beginning, God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to care for and nurture the creation.
They ate freely, and without experiencing suffering until they ate the fruit from the tree, God had
warned against, leading to their being expelled from the garden (Shelly & Miller, 2009). That
was the beginning of the fallenness since from then; God set boundaries between Himself and
man. The Christian narrative holds that the fallenness of the world brought with it human
suffering (Shelly & Miller, 2009). God spoke a curse upon Adam and Eve, saying they would
toil to get food, women experience pain when giving birth, and also the ultimate consequence of
death. In this scenario, George may associate his suffering to sin because God pronounced sin as
the leading cause of suffering. Human beings sin any other time hence fall short of the glory of
God. Comparatively, George may relate the pain he is experiencing to the sinful nature of human
beings. Humans do not accept the subjection to the curse of suffering resulting from rejecting
God at the Garden of Eden at the very beginning of life. For that reason, humans corrupt